The Case for Contextualism - Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 1
Keith DeRose
Language: English
Pages: 303
ISBN: 2:00254451
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"This volume will be of particular benefit to graduate students and researchers looking to gain initial sympathetic familiarity with contextualism; it is also clear and accessible enough to be suitable for advanced undergraduates. This book will be among the first resources I turn to when students ask for an introduction to "knows" contextualism."
-Jonathan Ichikawa, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
tendency to show that our ordinary claims to ‘know’ are false.¹⁸ Whether the skeptic actually succeeds in what she threatens may be a very unclear matter. But none of this helps with Schiffer’s complaint; in fact, it may exacerbate the problem Schiffer alleges. What Schiffer finds incredible is that ordinary speakers might be ‘bamboozled by their own words’: that they might confound what propositions they are expressing by their use of ‘know(s)’ in dealing with [SA]. It certainly doesn’t seem to
range is a function of subject factors (which don’t affect the content of the attribution) as well as attributor factors (which do). There can be a drastic change in the range of relevant alternatives from one attribution to another without there being any change in meaning between the two attributions, then, because the difference in relevant alternatives can be, and often will be, the result of differences in subject factors, which will not have any effect on the meaning of the attribution.³⁵
Among the situations in which speakers do this are contexts like the one we’ve just considered in which the speakers are discussing those absent subjects as potential informants to the speakers. 64 the ordinary language basis But there are other conversational situations where quite different conversational purposes are in play, and in which speakers will apply to absent subjects standards that are appropriate to the practical contexts of those subjects. This often happens when, for example,
Someone sees a woman with a man. Taking the man to be her husband, and observing his attitude towards her, he says, ‘Her husband is kind to her,’ and someone else may nod, ¹⁸ In his well-known discussion of Donnellan (Kripke 1977), Saul Kripke complains about this caginess. In a later paper, Donnellan writes: ‘It might be thought, however, that if the position of this paper were correct that an ambiguity in the definite article would at least be suggested and that it is intuitively very
knowledge go up, making ‘I know that p’ go false and unassertable, the standards for the warranted assertability of the simple ‘p’ will rise, making it unassertable too.³¹ Thus, it’s no surprise ³¹ In the text here, I explain why the assertability of ‘p’ fades away together with that of first-person claims to ‘know’ that p, where the phenomenon being accounted for is relatively straightforward. Recall from our discussion in section 4, however, that there is also something to account for in the